I see the Montreal Gazette is running into a problem it has had before. As they say, if you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to relive your mistakes. The Gazette is a very good newspaper but I see from the readers’ letters this morning that others are upset again the way I am. Some may think it’s a small thing but Sunday morning is a time of gentle repose and it’s nice when things run smoothly.

I guess the powers that be at the Gazette can never leave well alone. As the letter writers point out, the new design for the Sunday edition is fine for a lone reader but with a husband and wife or more sharing the paper, you run into difficulties. There are now only two sections. Sports is in a tabloid-type section and everything else is in a single section. So who gets that first. The previous design had four sections so you could easily split the paper among the eager readers. Now calamity.

It’s almost 5 years to the day (March 4th 2001 my Copernic desktop search tells me) since I wrote to the Gazette the previous time to complain about the new Sunday design with everything in a single section. I also complained that they were putting the two crosswords back to back on the same page of the newspaper so you could only do one crossword at a time. On this second problem, they said they could make no guarantees since content ruled, however they would do their best. On the first problem, they offered to send me a second copy for free so that my wife and I could both read what we liked. .. and they did for months. Great customer service. Eventually they changed the design and the problem went away.

Now it’s back.

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